The Right Hand of Sleep (4 page)

—Thank you, Maman. I’m tired, mostly. Don’t warm up the stove on my account.

She laughed again quietly. —I’ve been keeping that stove warm for nigh to twenty years, you wandering Judas.

—
Maman! J’ai mort de faim!
said Voxlauer the next morning, crossing to the kitchen table. Outside the sky was a vibrant blue and the sunlight shone full on the back of his chair as it had on those Sundays when they’d taken breakfast late, coming up hungry from service with the meal warming in the oven and his father playing brightly through the parlor door. While Maman busied herself around the table Voxlauer would stand with his ear to the paneling listening to the music and the squeak of Père’s stool as he leaned in and away from the keys and picture him on the other side, elegant and intent, oblivious to small things like service or the setting of the table for breakfast. Sometimes the music would stop abruptly and he would hear the scratching of a fountain pen on paper for a moment or the sound of his father humming to himself, a little flatly, before it began again. —For God’s sake, Karl! Maman would shout when breakfast was laid out and the music would shift from allegro to adagio and shortly afterward Père would come cheerfully to table.

—It’s like a Sunday today, said Voxlauer, pulling out the chair. —I’ve slept late.

She smiled. —You’ve slept clear to Sunday. But I suppose you’re entitled.

He looked at her. —I’ve come a long way, this week.

—I know, Oskar. So you’re entitled. How did you sleep?

—Very well.

—Good.

—A bit cramped, maybe.

She smiled again. —You’ve grown. And I suppose the guest room hasn’t.

He nodded. —Not much has changed.

—More than you think, Oskar.

—What do you mean?

—Well, she said, crossing to the stovetop. —In town.

—Oh. That. He stared out the window at the slate wall with the canal behind it. —Is there really such a difference, now to then?

—I know, Oskar! she said, wiping her hands with a washcloth. —I know about your fine ideas. I read the books you told me to read. I read your letters, what few there were of them. Did you read mine, I wonder?

Voxlauer didn’t answer. —Those were some time ago, those fine ideas, he said finally.

—Certainly they were. She watched him for a while. —There’s a difference now, in town.

Outside the window the canal was brightening even further in the growing light and plate-sized pieces of ice here and there revolved slowly, as if in a gentle current. He wondered idly what sort of fish were underneath them.

—You’ve made it just in time for elections, she said, setting down the coffee and a plate of rolls. —Irma Gratzer’s coming at eleven.

—Elections?

She shrugged. —Elections. The town council no-accounts. She winked.

—I’m not registered.

She clucked brightly, waving a hand. —We’ll take care of that first, then.

—I’m not going into town yet.

—Oskar.

—Yes?

She paused a moment, looking at him looking back at her. Her expression softened. —Suit yourself, then.

As he heard her footfalls on the gravel his breath came easier to him. His worn face had shocked her. He’d sent photographs but those were now years out of date. One of the house, one of the horses. One of himself and Anna, taken on the occasion of their third anniversary. He went into the parlor to look for them.

The parlor gave no sign that so much as a saucer had been shifted those twenty-odd years. The watercolors hung palely in their gilt-edged frames on three sides of the dining table and the table itself was covered by a dust-heavy cloth. It had the smell of a room long since sealed against time, shut away and forgotten, though he knew she must pass through it daily to reach the verandah. A line of wash was strung through the open door and he recognized his own linen dangling from it, steaming in the midmorning sun. He sat himself down with the sun at his back and his feet on the warm clay tiles and spread open a folio of photographs.

The folio held several bundles of varying sizes randomly bound together. He undid the twine from each bundle and organized them into heaps, oldest to newest, along the yellow-glazed wall of the verandah. The first to catch his eye was a large overexposed picture of his father on the steps of the opera in a wide-brimmed fedora and a loden jacket, pointing at the ground. On the back of the photograph the words “new shoes” were scrawled in his father’s crimped, fastidious hand. A woman who might or might not have been Maman stood laughing in the middle distance, waving a patterned shawl.

In the next picture she was more clearly visible. She stood frowning at the camera in mock displeasure, the playful curl of her lips wholly alien to his conception of her. In the third his father had removed his fedora and sat cross-legged on the steps, grinning and gesturing at the sky with his baton. On its back he had written “the fool.” Voxlauer looked at this picture for a long time, trying to imagine his mother and Père’s life before his birth, before she’d left the opera, before Père had stopped composing and become ill. He thought of their slow, courtly promenades along the canal, acknowledging the greetings of the passersby, and tried to imagine them much younger still, on a similar walk in Arnstadt, or in Teplitz-Schönau, or in Berlin. But the memory of Père in his last year came to him instead, as it always did: on his bench in the farthest corner of the orchard, hollowed out and unsure of his surroundings, aged beyond measure by his sickness and by the slow corruption of everything, the murders of the Kaiserin and of Archduke Ferdinand, the workers’ strikes and the revolutions and the Kaiser’s own idiocies and lastly, most of all, by the unforeseeable vastness of the war. Voxlauer laid the print down carefully by its edges.

There followed in the pile a number of photographs well known to him of Maman in various of the roles she had performed in the years before her marriage, carefully composed publicity shots taken against a painted drop of Grecian tombs and arbors.
La
Bohème, Turandot, La Traviata.
Names he’d been entranced by as a child. The gilt edges of the daguerreotypes muddied and discolored by thumbprints. Maman at seventeen, barely distinguishable behind crepe veils and sequins in a large-scale cast portrait for
Aída.
The opera house in Arnstadt, weather-stained and somber. A picture of his father visibly older and ill-of-health, reclining in a loose-fitting summer shirt on the verandah—fifty years of age, possibly a little more, reading to him from a tattered paper copy of James Fenimore Cooper’s
Pioneers.

Later he found the pictures of Anna taken on the farm and at the market in Cherkassy. In the first she was in front of the house, her face to the hard, flat sun, the bright puddles of snow-thaw behind her bleeding into her outline. Her hair hung in two thick plaits and shone warmly through the sepia of the print. Her plain straight mouth was open slightly, as though she’d been talking as he fidgeted with the borrowed camera, and her hands were clasped tightly at her waist. In the photograph from Cherkassy they stood an arm’s length apart, both regarding the camera suspiciously, as though it were an unwelcome witness to their happiness. His cheeks were drawn and sunken from his vagrancy and his beard was growing in uneven, downy patches, like an adolescent’s or a beggar’s. Already these photographs, too, were taking on the quality of publicity shots for a wholly imaginary life. And this parlor and verandah which in past years he’d not been capable of remembering clearly formed the model again for all he knew or understood, as it had from his earliest days.

Sometime past noon he fell asleep on the carpet. When he awoke he found that a blanket had been draped over him and a half-opened snowbell set on a kerchief near his head. Maman’s voice and the voice of another woman carried through the hallway and across the open stairwell.

—The wages of immodesty.

—What was it exactly?

—Liver.

—Ah. The liver. I see.

The woman’s voice was high and reedy and cut into his mother’s even tones like a schilling cast into a puddle of water. It seemed familiar to Voxlauer but he made no effort to place it. He listened to them awhile discussing him and his prospects in town as he might have listened to news of a foreign disaster on the radio, or as a child half-asleep listens to the talk of adults at ease and smoking after dinner. He drew the blanket over his head.

—I never once gave my approval of the “arrangement,” as he called it.

—What became of the first man?

—I haven’t the slightest. Liver most likely.

—Now Dora.

A brief pause. The sound of tea being poured, and the smell of it. He was still very tired and allowed himself to drift in and out of waking with their talk always liminally addressing him along the seams and the margins of his memory.

—Like a Bolshevik, with that face of his.

—Yes. Well, you definitely should shave him before bringing him to anybody.

—Ach,
Irma. As if he’d once let me near him.

—Well. A silence. —Where will you take him, then?

—I don’t know. Herbst’s.

—With that face? In a gasthaus?

—He’s a good boy for all that. They know our family still, in town, I believe.

—Of course they do, Dora. There’s nothing to say in that regard.

—And they remember him, too, some of them.

Another pause. —Some of them do, yes.

—Paul Ryslavy does.

—He’s been away so long, Dora. And with the Russians the whole while.

—Because of that woman. She cursed quietly. —That turnip picker.

—Well.

—What?

—Well, Dora—

—It was cancer of the liver, said Voxlauer, stepping in from the stairwell.

—You’ll never guess who I saw today, Maman said cheerily, reaching past him for the soap brick. —At the elections.

—Who?

—Sister Milnitsch. She looked over at him. —Kati.

—No. Is Kati a Dominikanerin now?

—These twenty years.

Voxlauer let out a low whistle. —I must have made quite an impression on her.

—Ha! Don’t flatter yourself, Oskar.

—Well. I’m only saying. He wrung out the dish towel and took three chipped Meissen saucers from her. —Let them out now, do they?

—Only at elections. They drive them down the hill in one of the bishop’s cars. Drive them back up when they’re finished.

—Kati Milnitsch. I haven’t thought of her in ages.

—Well, neither have I, Oskar. She looked lovely in a habit. You’d be surprised.

—No I wouldn’t.

—All right then. All right. She poured the dishwater slowly from the tin basin into the drain. —You missed something there, though, Oskar! she said.

Voxlauer set the plates down and made a face. —Maman. I was sixteen years old.

—I was barely eighteen when your Père and I were married.

Voxlauer didn’t answer.

—Oskar?

—I don’t want to talk about Père.

She was quiet awhile then, staring down at the plates. —You’re so old, now, Oskar, she said finally. —Who would have you? She paused again. —You were beautiful once. Beautiful. I don’t mind saying so.

—I’ve already had a wife.

She took the plates from the counter in front of him and stacked them and took them over to the cupboard and put them in carefully, one after the other. The plates squeaked loudly as she stacked them.

—I won’t hear a word about her, Maman. He paused a moment, looking at her. —Not a word. I’m warning you now.

—What can we talk about, then, Oskar? She was quiet for a time. —I haven’t said anything, she said, still facing the cupboard door. —I haven’t said anything yet.

—That’s a lie, Voxlauer said simply.

After dinner he shaved off his beard with his father’s straight razor and let her cut his hair in front of a full-length mirror she’d saved from her opera days. Then he went out into the twilight, still dressed in his traveling clothes, and walked down through the garden.

When he came to the bridge he turned and followed the creek for a minute or so till he reached the southern boundary stone. Then he went left, stepping over the creek, and made his way through the tight-woven bracken till he’d traced the property line east to the orchard. In places he barely recognized the garden and full-grown trees appeared suddenly before him where none existed in his memory. The birchwood pavilion at the northwest corner of the orchard was badly decayed and the floorboards felt spongelike and slippery beneath his feet. The house where Greiss and his son had lived was now locked and shuttered. The open barn next to it was empty except for the cart he’d fallen onto the night before. He wondered who had moved it. Had she? No, she was too old to do such things. Not too old, he reminded himself. Still.

—Still, she looks old, said Voxlauer aloud.

The vegetable garden lay under a thin shirt of ice where the slate wall shadowed it and skeletons of the last year’s wine hung in curls from the trellises and rattled with an angry tenacity as he brushed past them. When he rounded the house Maman was waiting for him on the verandah. —Don’t be too late, she called down. He said nothing in reply but went out through the gate and shutting it behind him made a small gesture, more an acknowledgment than a wave, and set off up the snow-guttered road to the ruin.

Past the canal the road curved sharply uphill to the hump of pocked granite the ruin rose from, black and crumbling, like scaffolding for a vanished building. Three quarters around the outcrop the houses fell away and a trail wound through snarls of winter bracken to the summit. From there the ruin was like an immense stage set, gothic and fragile, behind which the entire plain lay shuttered against the cold. A ladder led up through the remains of the sacristy and he climbed to the roof and looked across the hillside.

St. Michael’s and the square lay bare and unpeopled except for a few sedans and delivery cars spaced evenly in the snow and a pack of dogs circling the fountain, dry and crated over for the winter. The Niessener Hof and Gasthaus Rindt faced each other sullenly across the square, the Bahnhofstrasse lolling out between them. The avenue itself was largely unlit and he noticed that many of the shops he remembered toward the station had disappeared. A train was just pulling out and beyond it the alleys and lanes of town gave way to a belt of newer, more landed properties and beyond those the first modest farms. He cast about for the creek and found it where it forked at the canal and followed it with his eyes down into the garden and past the house where a light was still burning and further out still along the toll-road through the willows southward. The train passed silently between them, its twin taillights fluttering. He turned and clambered back down the ladder. The sky overhead was clear and cold.